Boost your self-hosted WordPress with Jetpack

March 9, 2011

Scott Berkun

WordPress.com has grown into one of the most amazing cloud architectures in the world. This has enabled blogs hosted here to have features unavailable on self-hosted WordPress installs. This makes us sad, since here at WordPress.com we want every WordPress install everywhere to be amazing.

In this spirit, we have great news. We are now making the power of WordPress.com available to almost all WordPress blogs, regardless of where they are hosted.

With Jetpack, a new plugin from Automattic, people not on WordPress.com can now access features that depend on WordPress.com. Jetpack also provides convenience features that don’t use the cloud, but are now easier to install, or were unavailable as plugins before.

(Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs. We checked with them first and we’re mutually cool on the use of the name.)

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I’m considering moving a business site of mine to a self-hosted wordpress format, modified a little to suit its needs. What puts me off is inertia (currently someone else manages the technical side of that business), and also uncertainty as to whether the knowledge I’ve acquired while personal blogging here on wordpress.com would be transerable to a self-hosted wordpress.org platform. This is a reassuring development on that score.

I think I am speechless. Technology is amazing. The possibilities are endless and for someone like me; more than I can can think about.
You really have to be out there and forward thinking this stuff. The developers that come up with the all this is astounding.. Thx

This is great! I had been putting off the move to self-hosting (though I’ve been paying for the domain name for ages now… yuck) because of the loss of functionality I was expecting to experience. However, this puts me at ease and reassures me for the future. Now to actually come up with the gumption to get my act together and make the move…

WordPress.org sites are self-hosted and separate from WordPress.com. Only WordPress.com sites (which we host, and all run on our infrastructure, with shared code between them, unlike WordPress.org sites) are included in tag pages/searches on WordPress.com. You’re not being carved out of any community by using WordPress.org, but WordPress.com is its own specific community. We’re hoping to bridge that gap with Jetpack though 🙂

Currently WordPress.com users get a lot of features as part of their experience that WordPress.org users don’t get (and often don’t want!). Jetpack is our way of making more of the .com features available to .org users, so that they can pick and choose what works for them.

Would probably be great but I have a some troubles with sharedaddy and twitter.

With sharedaddy : I made numerous attempts to share a post by e-mail (with various emails) but I don’t receive any mail. I looked in the spam folder but they’re not there either. What should I do ? Also, I find it quite difficult to add services (in fact, I did not make it). Maybe a little more explanations would be useful.

With twitter : I was happy to be able to hide the answers. So I activated it. It seems to work once then it shows that twitter experiences a problem…

If Jetpack auto-deactivates a previous stand-alone plugin, you’ll need to manually re-activate it if you decide to turn off the Jetpack version. Note however that any stand-alone plugins which we’re rolling into Jetpack (Sharedaddy, Stats and After the Deadline) will no longer receive updates outside of Jetpack (you will need to switch to the Jetpack version to get any new updates).

This is good I suppose, before I say more I should probably search a little more on the offerings of this. However, I assumed self hosted or otherwise hosted wordpress blogs (like from wordpress.org) would allow the administrator more freedoms. There are a lot of features that .org has over .com. I’m possibly stating something completely irrelevant to this news, so I beg your pardon if that is the case. But eventually I plan on moving my .com to .org obviously requiring another host. Would Jetpack be advantageous to have when I do so? (Rhetorical of course- I plan on doing my research now. I am still a newb)

WordPress.org does provide more freedom than WordPress.com, but with that freedom comes the responsibility of maintaining your own website, keeping up to date etc. Jetpack provides WordPress.org users with some of the additional features that were previously only available to WordPress.com users.

So, does it mean that new features will be popping out immediately at a self-hosted wordpress blog? Does it mean jetpack plugins will download and install new plugins immediately from wordpress’ plugins gallery?

“With Jetpack, a new plugin from Automattic, people not on WordPress.com can now access features that depend on WordPress.com.”

While I’m very happy for our WordPress.org friends that these features are now available to them too, I’m confused why this was announced on the WordPress.com blog. The ORG blog looks like it could use some lovin’ ❤ or did you confuse the two, too. 🙂

As others have mentioned one of the key reasons I use WordPress.com vs a self-hosted installation is the discoverability and built-in community. I know it’s asking a lot, but if those could be incorporated into a future release of Jetpack I might actually faint from sheer bliss.

Sounds fantastic. And a few juicy features already available. Can we look forward to the dot com email subscription feature as part of the jetpack offering? I’m loving this feature on dot com – easy subscription plus smooth looking mails to subscribers every time a new blog posts goes online – and have so far failed to locate a plugin that does exactly the same for the selfhosted blog I’m currently developing.

Oh, I did not think that I could get video clips on my blog without paying for it? If I’m trailing behind in the uptake, let me know. I cannot see how to do that. Thanks so much. Great name by the way! When I tried to open Jetpack after saving it there was no (obvious) way to install it.

Jetpack does not host the video clips, it just makes it easier to embed them when they are hosted on another site (such as YouTube). If you install Jetpack then there are some links in the Learn More section under the “Shortcode Embeds” module.

great! love jetpack i always wanted shortcodes for wordpress sel hosted blogs as a plugin now we get is all in one i wanted someone to code that into plugin but luckily for me after about a year this comes straight from the awesome automattic wordpress stats and wp.me shortlinks were available separately in the plugin WordPress.com Stats i always used wordpress stats for wp.me links on every instance i have of self hosted wordpress

thanks developers! thanks for the awesome plugin
i especially like the foot note you guys being cool with using jetpack as a name i love mozilla’s awesome open source project too
it’s a win win for me
thanks again!

Okay – spell it out for a Newb – what are the benefits of this? A for instance … I have my own blog and one for my new nonprofit organization. The site I host my domain through keeps crashing or otherwise having major issues, plus I am just not that much of a tech person. So …
What makes more sense – keeping my new non-profit organization’s blog on the .com version and figuring out how to pull my other site, adding the content under the pages option and then redirecting my URL? (that really sounds difficult to my technology challenged behind)
OR
Switching the whole thing over to a self-hosted site?
It sounds like the first option would work best for me, but is there a resource that points out the steps (for the HTML challenged) one would need to take to complete this? I love the ease of WordPress.com – and the reliability, but have held off on acting as I was unsure of the best choice.

My impression is that Jetpack helps you change the style and size of your font …. I have a wordpress.com site but I don’t know how to change the style or size of the font. Is there a feature to do that already on the .com sites?

The mystery is finally unfolded. I’ve been asking myself why don’t my self hosted wordpress have a stats by default, instead I have to install a plugin.
Thanks a lot, I now can use this lovely features.

The older version of WordPress.com stats should continue to work even with Jetpack now handling it for all new users. If you’re having trouble, please contact us via the support link here: http://jetpack.me/support/

This is no longer applicable to me, fortunately… I used to be self-hosted using WordPress.org. But, I decided to move to WordPress.com because of the extra security and convenience. I no longer have to constantly backup my databases and update my WordPress and plugin software. I have everything I need here in WordPress.com, without the muss and fuss! Keep up the great work everybody! X